One night her mother discovered two figures writhing on the roof. One of them was her own so she slapped it across the mouth, hard, grabbed her by the wrist, and raced Allis downstairs to her bedroom. Took her phone away—lots of begging and crying, I hate you’s, etc. The slam of the door, and the plangent anger of the mother leaning against said door. Young Allis is hellbent on getting pregnant.

Her older brother had to drive the piddly little suitor home. The headlights of the family Audi illuminated just a few feet—a few seconds really—ahead. The boys stared at the road as the car ate it up. It was the suburbs. You either get away with stuff or you don’t.

It’s not sex I want, she told her parents.

Attention? You want attention?

I want a baby, said Allis. Twelve might be as old as I’ll get.

You could argue that she’s throwing away her so-called youth, but they say these years aren’t meant to be all fun and games. In fact, they’re long and painful. Her brother is finding them incredibly painful. Just look at him. He’s the type who always has to hold back whatever depressing thought he might blurt out, like, all my life I assumed the world would be fine and that everything will work out but it just won’t. My pain is universal and horrifyingly local. I will never be with the one I actually love, the one who justifies mosquitoes and spiders and the right choice and death. He doesn’t want to be that guy but he is.

Allis is a child. Allis isn’t adult enough for a kid. Allis can’t even drive. She can’t even work. She can’t reach certain shelves, she can’t fathom. Can she even flower? Childhood depression is a kicker though. They thought she beat that but guess not.

The brother drops Allis off at the Walter Elliot Middle School entrance where no one is waiting for her. Even now, after last night’s sexual stab in the dark, she doesn’t look older or riper than any of the other children. Affected blonde and brunette heads trudge through the school doors, past the security guard and the metal detector and the dogs. Allis is not even breaking the dress code like the other girls. She repped no special aura or tapped quality, not like a madonna or a future model. He can’t imagine she’ll actually accomplish her mission.

The PE teacher says, These are the days of your lives you should be doing the mile in under ten.

Allis changes in her gym locker. The bathrooms smell like girl mold. The children with their fine legs and fine hair worry the sun. She walks part of the mile with a fat lagger, then falls back and hides behind a bush. The leaves have curved, horned edges that hurt your feet if you run through them barefoot. She kneels and scrolls through her contacts.

The brother’s driving with his knees, even on the curvier bends of the roads, to go downtown for lunch. The brother parks with his hands. He gets out and looks at his parking job and it’s pretty bad. The lunch rush hasn’t hit yet. Downtown is soft. He goes to the Italian deli and gets a sandwich and sips brown tea between each bite, then buys a six pack of beer with his Colorado fake ID. He fills the tea bottle with beer and sits and drinks it plainly, staring into the dirt’s face. Class drones on miles away.

It won’t snow this year, the teacher is saying. It’s too warm. It skips years now.

He looks out into the downtown plaza as it fills and catches memories as they fall. Soccer practice. He was the goalie. He prayed that his teammates would hustle hard enough on offense so that the ball would never come his way, and he would not need to pretend to try to stop a shot. He would sit between the goalposts and scratch his ass and pick leaves of grass, pretending an indie film was being made about his childhood. The director would praise his piercing melancholy and the effortless transfer of deep, inward reflection to the big screen. He would never need to speak a word of dialogue, and when the ball does inevitably end up in his corner, the director just cuts to the next scene because it doesn’t matter if the other team scores or not. What matters is his kid listlessness and general lack of motivation toward organized sports, toward organized anything really, even emotions.

Didn’t he have a direction once? He couldn’t remember. Will he still be good to drive if he has another beer and a joint, he’s thinking.

There’s also his girlfriend. The only emotion that is appropriate enough to funnel in the direction of her existence is what: Boredom, latent desire, disgust, normal bodily functions. In the mornings, she looks at him with such demand and affection and wide-eyed intensity that it’s overwhelming, all that love just up there in her face, surging toward him. She knows he doesn’t love her yet she chooses to stay. How pathetic, he thinks.

He picks up a cigarette butt from the pavement and rifles for a light and a mother from school sees him and makes to wave politely but notices the rifling and the scrounging plus the unfortunate scrunched quality of his face and decides not to. She’s heard about that family. The woman gets in her silver hatchback and takes a breath and thinks of her own little son who was just recently caught sneaking out. Thank God she doesn’t have a daughter!

On the way back to campus, the brother is thinking about Allis when he almost hits a brown nanny and her white kid. The nanny’s shopping bags go flying and she yanks the tot out of the way and then pulls this obscene little flail of a hand gesture at his car as if to say, “Do you realize how precious life is and how close you just came to—”

Okay, yeah, that was a close one. He would be changed, and the nanny, who is now picking up the Charmin and Lays and Pepto Bismol which had exploded all over California Ave, would have been forever different too. It would be a moment of transformation, one that might even express itself in the DNA and mental makeup of his own future children. What do they call that again? Inherited trauma? But a brush with earthy ghosts might be good for him, he thinks. If life is going to change as we know it, it might as well be now and it might as well be drastic. He should start thinking about how he wants to live in the world and if a terrible tragedy is the necessary mirror, then so be it. At least Allis is trying. We have very few choices, and even fewer chances.

The kid he nearly hit is crying but it shuts up when the nanny gives it the phone. Suck suck suck the eyes on the phone, sucky sucky scrolly scrolly. The brother pulls over and refills the tea bottle and tries to think of something else to think about.

Meanwhile, Jayson of the lacrosse team answered Allis’ call but backed out of the final act, intimidated by her normal desire. She knows exactly what she wants and explained it in very clear, straightforward terms. He tried to listen. They have known each other since kindergarten but were never really close, yet he still remembers Allis as the only kid who was allowed to stay awake and read during nap time. She was afraid of sleep.

He leaves her in the bushes with hives on her knees and thighs and so she walks the trail back and the PE teacher scolds her and sends her to the school nurse.

The nurse’s breasts are so large that one rests on Allis’ thigh as she applies an ointment to the proliferating poison ivy welts, and Allis sorta likes the warmth and the weight and imagines her own iterations. Milk, and stuff. The nurse inquires as to why exactly she was naked in the bushes then decides to do a check-up. Asks some oldie-but-goodie questions about adolescent life, sensitive relationships with family, teachers, self, plans for the future, vague senses of doom, etc. She notes Allis’ budding chest. Allis notes the way the nurse blinks at her answers. Period, yes, she’s had it. Intercourse, no, not yet, technically.

Her brother is called back to campus to pick her up and take her home. The nurse walks her out to the parking lot just as he screeches up. He loves this parking lot. He feels like a parking lot, often. He’s had the best fun doing bad things in parking lots. The nurse narrows her eyes at him and he regards her as a foe. Allis gets in the car. He tells her to buckle up. The nurse notes the distinctions in the siblings’ otherwise identical gaze.

Later, the school psychiatrist says it’s not unusual for girls this age to fixate on things like this. But this isn’t fixation. This is war.

It was not religion either, unless you factor in God’s plan, obviously, because secretly, Allis, like all reasonable young ladies, was a believer. Raw faith had fermented in her but she could not let it cross the threshold of her lips lest her brother, mother, and father titter and inquire, Where did you get that idea from? Isn’t that the point, she would retort. Where did I get the whole idea from?

Soon her brother’s friends catch word. The whole school does. The whole school is pregnant with word. The thinking is this: if you have a kid now, then you’re only thirty-something by the time it’s all grown up. That’s still kinda young. You get a whole second life.

Speaking of suffering. Have you heard about the brother’s actual love? He’s miserable in part because he loves this other girl in the way that he wishes to unearth everything about her. He wants to hear about her first memory of music, and see the way she looks at herself in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. He wants to bear witness to all her mundanities, and he wants to be the one to bring them forth, like milk from a rock. But he’ll never say it, and they’ll never speak.

But it’s late now and Allis is safely locked up in her room and his parents are in bed, not fucking, so he’s taken the car out to do something drastic. There were those movies where boys threw rocks at the bedroom windows of pretty girls. What were those movies? He’s out there, thinking: Fuck, this is actually insane, this is an utterly deranged and hopeless situation. Even if this chick did come outside, even if he did knock or call, what would he do? If he squeezed the rock it would produce a black milk, a sinful sludge to be choked down and winced through. One that tasted like himself. He imagines a natural disaster blowing their lives together. Then the sprinklers go off and quench him through and through.

He has a set of keys to his actual girlfriend’s house because he comes and goes as he pleases. He lets himself into the family of shadows and crawls into her bed. She doesn’t stir, like something dead. Lying next to her, he hallucinates, soberly, that his mother was a child again, and that they were playing together in bright red snow, catching the bloody flakes on their pink tongues, until Helen Mirren pulled up in a carriage and waved them inside.

When the vision pops, he moves closer to his girlfriend and smells her neck. She mm’s and says, What time is it, and he guesses, roughly, and then they have unprotected sex in the shape of two parentheses.

She didn’t even pretend to come, he thought, which was a relief. Then he’s trying to fall asleep but the door opens and another boy enters, like a natural disaster. The brother lies frozen and invisible until the strange boy tries to slide into bed too. The brother grapples around and socks him right in the alleged mouth or nose.

He inquires in low shouts as to who the fuck this guy is and how did he get in here, does he have keys too, yanking the duvet over his girlfriend’s nakedness. They’re both yelling and meanwhile she’s shushing them in a not very hushed tone herself, be quiet, be quiet, my parents are asleep, etc.

Disturbed by his attempt to shield her nakedness, he tries to hit something on the way home but the roads are empty as ever.

Her mother is pounding chicken breast when Allis walks in the next day and says, So now I just wait fifteen years to start my life, her mother says there’s always time, which they both know is not entirely true. There’s always time but it’s not always yours. This is why Allis must move quickly.

The red-eyed brother grabs a slice of white bread and decks it out with Bonne Maman jam, stuffs it in his mouth and asks his mother, Why not just let her be? And his mother asks what’s wrong with him. What’s that tone? Allis explains that his girlfriend has been cheating on him and love is sullied forever. He will be suspicious of everyone for a long time, mostly because he perceived himself as so much better than her, and now even the worst of the worst has managed to wrong him. This is divine cruelty, he thinks.

Is she a child or is she not. Is she ready or is she not. Are her ears clean and her organs developed or not. Does she still have an imagination. Does she still play with dolls. Does her inner child live on. Because she won’t give up now. It’s past that.

After extensive deliberation, the parents let their twelve year old out to be herself. Though the father still sees ghosts in his sleep, and the mother fears criticism from the community, the decision settles. Maybe she will nip herself in the bud.

Allis recruits two large Chinese twins in cargo shorts, Titan and Jove, from the sistering school.They meet in the bushes on the mile because Allis believes in nature.

Damn, Allis, says Titan. Are you… Aren’t you…? Do you have…? No one ever thought to put her on birth control, of course. Not that she’d have allowed it.

The PE teacher is making his way around the track looking for stragglers. They can hear him crashing around on the trail. Jove seems down. Titan doesn’t understand the endgame. The game is the end. Allis knows this better than anyone.

The bell’s about to ring. The PE teacher guesses the kids had already finished up and gone back to the locker rooms. Maybe they were shaping up nicely, and they would make it through middle school and the rest intact. Maybe they could do the mile in eight minutes this year.

After a couple of weeks the test comes back negative.

One day the brother checks and finds the courage is there and he DMs his actual love, Meet me. The sky is off. It might be spring. He waits and waits, simmering, blossoms falling on his windshield.

I’ll protect you forever. I wish you did not exist. I have made a planet just for you. I have built the climate and the flora and the fauna to make you happy and comfortable. You can be there with me, and lie in my God’s sun. I will salvage anything you desire that has been lost. Your family can visit whenever. We’ve already wasted so much time. Fine. We’ll do it your way.

Then he writes his future self a letter. He’s trying to pour it all out but even in his most private, intimate moments, he writes with another in mind. He writes as if his actual love will find and read his letter. The brother imagines the director again, filming him, zooming in on his destroyed brow and long, designed stares into space. But he’s truly alone. And the brother should be honest with himself. And he should burn the letter, he thinks. The director would like that. He’d eat that shit up.

The siblings decide to visit an abandoned pool well-scarred with graffiti. Once children did swim there, and learned their bodies and enjoyed themselves. Some of them might even remember it, including the toddler that drowned. Now, standing eight feet deep, a hand against the rough cement where on the other side worms and matter made their life, surely, it was so stupidly obvious to Allis that the world was dying, and much more quickly than any human could perceive. Only the trees can hear them and both Allis and the brother are thinking that they would like their murmured speech and sensibilities to be associated with love and safety before it’s too late.

We’ll take care of it together, she said. We’ll never let it grow up. Isn’t it wonderful, how Mommy believes in us? And how Daddy works so hard? They would do anything.

Scuffing a sneaker on a eucalyptus leaf, the brother suggests from above the lip of the pool that prepubescent boys aren’t the most virile. She’s definitely not the problem, it’s them.

Allis asks him how he lost his virginity. He reveals a chubby Mexican girl who had gulped a liter of Gatorade just before they started. He heard the blue liquid sloshing within as he plied himself over her. She sounded so full, like there was a whole body within her. When it was over and he was dressing he felt exactly the same as before. The next day the girl requested fifty bucks on Venmo.

They go to a party but all the important kids are leaving, drinks in hand. He has checked his phone maybe forty times. Allis is inside, meeting people, seeking a father. Don’t worry, she’s not the youngest one there. See the fourteen year old trollops and the freshmen practicing their dances in the corner? We can all pretend to mind their flipping skirts, their unfulfillment.

Come blue flame of morning, the brother’s boys are seated in a circle of big leather armchairs in the basement of a generational home. There’s a wall-to-wall pile rug that probably contains particles of Davey Boy’s childhood. Each beercan the brother picks up isn’t completely empty yet and so he goes around and kills each, and thinks he’s doing a good deed or something by it. Allis attempts her own secret deed.

When the piss stick reveals the future, the brother takes her aside and asks, is this really what you want, Allis? To bring a child into this world?

There are many beautiful things that can happen on earth. Things that can only happen here.

What, you don’t want good American people to have families? Women of a certain age are often displeased with the success of other, younger women. But her parents are overjoyed, to their own surprise. They feel younger, somehow. Even the teachers thumb the sonograms with a grin. All the other kids want a picture with her pale belly. The PE teacher lets Allis sit on the bleachers and plan her blossoming future, and tells her about epidurals and Ferberization and cracked nipples and how he swears on his goddamn life that he remembers his own birth and he’d crawl back in if he could.

And when Allis unfolds and the child arrives, you can see it. I saw it, all covered in blood and goop and other world.

The brother tries the Allis way but can’t find the right one. His actual love fell victim to university, and his ex-girlfriend is an OnlyFan. Meanwhile, more and more young girls will get pregnant, and they’ll spawn Walter Elliott Middle School like crazy. It’s a sea of pregnant thirteen year olds, sorta. The whole school curriculum adapts. Most of the fathers step up to the plate. They all look forward to the naming and the rearing. Everyone’s on their phone less, sleeping less too, what with all the crying and midnight feeding, but still. The young fathers study and get jobs and the young women eat more, worry less, enjoy their bodies, marvel at them even. It’s better than hard drugs, right? Hey, it’s better than rehabilitation boarding schools in New Hampshire. It’s cheaper than therapy. They still have their whole lives ahead of them as people.

Only one in a billion will live to be one hundred and sixteen years old. And so when Allis’ brother approached me and introduced the two of us, I had to try. Occasionally it’s okay to lead a quick life.